Lighter side of the immigration debate: fact-checking gems from YouTube

That's how a longtime foreign correspondent I know underscored the importance of fact-checking. It's a sentiment we take to heart at the Monitor's commentary section: Assume nothing. Verify everything.

In practice, such rigor can mean long, tedious stretches poring over footnotes in PDFs (sorry, Wikipedia usually doesn't count). But sometimes, fact-checking requires us to...watch YouTube video clips. And yesterday, the juxtaposition between two clips I watched in short order was anything but eye-crossingly dull.

In the ad, Senator McCain and Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu are seen walking next to the 18-foot-tall steel columns that make up the border wall. The wall looks quite imposing, the kind of structure you'd need specialized training and equipment to surmount.

Yet the oped writer, Mr. Nicol, referenced a recent video showing two young women scaling the border fence in under 20 seconds. You have to see it to believe it:

So is the border wall a crucial component of what the first ad calls a "perfect" security plan – or is it a costly and ineffective joke? Both clips are tendentious, of course, so they shouldn't be the last word on such an important topic. But it's clear that these clips are worth a thousand footnotes.

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